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Paper long abstract

In 1966, Clifford Geertz, in a footnote, flagged the “underdevelopment” and even “non-existence” of an anthropology of religious commitment/non-commitment (1966:43). Rather than asking what such an anthropology might have looked like, we read Geertz’s comment as signaling an epistemic condition: at that moment, commitment was not an anthropologically thinkable object (Trouillot 2012). We ask how so.

Inspried by the 'affirmative geneology' method propsoed by Hans Joas (2013), we situate Geertz's observation within the intellectual realignments of American philosophy and social science in the 1950s~60s. Then eminent analytic philosophy decoupled commitment from a Western religious register, largely by separating fact from value and relocating the phenomenon of commitment into a domain of propositional knowledge, whose empirical manifestation is linguistic rather than embodied. This reconceptualization severed commitment’s link to contingent experience and situated action. By doing so, analytic philosophy rendered commitments intelligible as semantically recognized entities. Yet this same paradigm shift made the practical act of (non-)commitment effectively unthinkable for ethnographic inquiries.

By reconstructing these conditions of 'unthinkability', we argue that the absence of an anthropology of (non-)commitment was not a disciplinary accident but a consequence of a broader reconfiguration of the conceptual terrain shared by philosophy, religious studies, and social science. The paper does not offer an anthropological theory of commitment; it demonstrates why such a theory has been historically foreclosed. In doing so, it opens conceptual space for future theoretical and ethnographic work on the practical, relational, and processual forms of (non-)commitment in current social life.